Sardine Can is packed with 60 oblique tales and poems of assorted bit players at large; chiefly the mad, the bad, and the brokenhearted. Some traverse seas, wars, the twilight years, and squalor; others, the forlorn ruins of their consciences. There are weddings, funerals, road trips, and obsessions; loners, musos, insomniacs, and lovers. With ennui the haunting starts out early as just a sting. It first creeps within the marrow, then trawls across the apron of the heart like a salted Ouija glass; their tongues just strings in their throats . . .
